Red Spike Miniseries TPB in March

After 70 years of research, the United States government has finally created a Super Soldier and, in Jeff Cahn’s miniseries Red Spike, two of them survive the Red Spike program to show us what it’s all about. Matt Cutler and Greg Dane have had their brains tinkered with and adrenal glands manipulated, all in the name of superior performance. As the two are in the field, it becomes evident that not all is equal between them. When the scientists step in once again to “upgrade” Greg in issue one, it already seems evident that they don’t know what they are dealing with.

As the series continues and the the two Super Soldier friends find themselves in a battle of their own, the questions about the Red Spike program that created them continue to rise.

One of the questions that tends to pop into my mind is when the heck super scientists are going to figure out that humans are flawed and that making them super soldiers doesn’t always add up to them being super obedient? I was really happy to see that Jeff Cahn answered a similar question back in a November interview for MTV Geek:

Geek: Why can’t Army scientists in stories like this learn that if you create a bunch of super soldiers, at least one of them is going to go off the reservation?

Cahn: [Laughs]. Because then there wouldn’t be any good super-soldier stories. But to try to seriously answer your question, I think it’s man’s nature to always push the envelope. Be it physically or intellectually, we are always trying to achieve more. This is what allows us to create amazing things like skyscrapers and airplanes and space stations. But sometimes we don’t fully understand the ramifications of what we do.

I think the scientists in these stories are really smart and have gotten where they are by understanding the world and how things work in it. So there’s some arrogance there, where they believe that they’ve covered all the angles and that they have a solution to any problem that may arise, when in fact they don’t. It’s a “man’s reach exceeds his grasp” situation that gets blown out to the nth degree because of how smart Fairfield is and what it is he’s trying to grasp.

In five issues, Jeff Cahn provides a complete action story with a great arc to keep you turning the pages. It’s full of scientific arrogance, flawed humanity and pushing the envelope in all directions. He is helped along by the art of Salvador Navarro, and your eye has probably already been drawn to a number of the Red Spike covers created by none other than Mark Texeira (Wolverine, Punisher). On March 14th the entire series will be collected into a trade paperback, which will include gallery pages of the Mark Texeira cover art and some additional story material in the form of diary entries from Doctor Fairfield, the creator of the Red Spike program.

If you have missed this entire series, then take a sneak peek at the first issue for free on the Benaroya Publishing site while you wait for the TPB to be released from Image Comics.